The Hazards of Youth

The Hazards
of Youth

In more than 100 countries, people
are getting not only more numerous, but younger. "Youth bulges," combined with
economic stagnation and unemployment, can burden these countries with
disproportionately high levels of violence and unrest-severely challenging
their hopes for social and economic stability.

Just before
dawn on April 28, a band of machete- and knife-wielding attackers launched a
surprise assault on a police post in Thailand's southern province of Pattani.
Failing to overrun the building, the militants fled to the nearby Krue Sae
mosque, where they engaged in a three-hour shootout with heavily armed
government security forces. Troops riddled the 16th century red brick building
with automatic weapon fire, killing more than 30 of the attackers and leaving
their bodies sprawled in pools of blood.

The uprising was only one of
several clashes in Thailand's restive south that day, which ended with at least
108 suspected militants dead across three provinces. It marked a severe
escalation of four months of unrest in a country that had not seen such bloodshed
in three decades. As news of the conflict spread, analysts attributed the
tensions to rising ethnic discontent among the south's largely Muslim
population, which has long complained of cultural, religious, and economic
repression by the central government in Bangkok. In an address to the nation
soon after the attacks, however, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatr pointed to
another variable: the age and prospects of the combatants, most of whom were
under the age of twenty. "They are poor and have little education and no jobs,"
he noted. "They don't have enough income and have a lot of time, so it creates
a void for people to fill."

Unlike the more prosperous north,
Thailand's south has lagged on several key development indicators, including
demographics. Although population growth in the country overall has slowed
dramatically, reaching "replacement level" at just above two children per woman
by the mid-1990s, birth rates in the southern provinces remain high. Meanwhile,
industrial growth in the region has stagnated, leaving few opportunities for
this surging young population.

Thailand is not the only country in
the world feeling the effects of a demographic imbalance. According to the
United Nations, more than 100 countries worldwide had characteristic "youth
bulges" in 2000, i.e., young adults ages 15 to 29 account for more than 40
percent of all adults. All of these extremely youthful countries were in the
developing regions. By and large, the youth bulge is a thing of the past in
North America and Europe, where the young adult share of the population is only
about 25 percent of all adults.

Loss of Opportunity

In most
cases, a youth bulge is the result of several past decades of high birth rates.
It typically occurs in countries that are still in the earlier stages of their
transitions to slower-growing populations: although infant and child mortality
have begun to fall, birth rates still remain high, resulting in higher
proportions of children surviving overall. A youth bulge usually lingers for at
least two decades after fertility begins to decline, as large cohorts of
children mature into young adulthood. If low fertility is maintained, however,
this bulge gradually disappears.

Other demographic processes can
create a youth bulge as well. Sudden drops in infant mortality or a baby boom
in an industrial country can create a bulge in young adults two decades later.
Disproportionately high youth populations can also be present in countries
where large numbers of adults emigrate, or where AIDS is a major cause of
premature adult death.

An excess of youth isn't
necessarily a bad thing. In the United States and other industrial countries,
where most young adults have been educated or technically trained, employers
view young people as an asset and actively seek out their energy and ingenuity.
Indeed, economists have long recognized that a large cohort of young workers
can provide a demographic boost to growth in economies where the productivity,
savings, and taxes of young people support smaller subpopulations of children
and elderly. In Thailand, for instance, young, educated, and industrious
workers-including a large proportion of young women working in the country's
manufacturing and financial sectors-have contributed significantly to the
growth of the country's dynamic economy.

In other circumstances, however,
the predominance of young adults can be a social challenge and a political
hazard. In many developing countries, labor markets have been unable to keep
pace with population growth, contributing to high rates of unemployment. While
unemployment tends to be high in developing countries in general, that among
young adults is usually three to five times as high as overall adult rates.

Leif Ohlsson, a researcher at the
University of Göteborg in Sweden, notes that young men in rural areas are often
hardest hit relative to their expectations. Agriculture is the single largest
source of livelihood worldwide, but many young rural men expecting to inherit
land increasingly find themselves disinherited. In some cases, their fathers
and grandfathers have long since divided up the family property into tiny
parcels that would be unworkable if they were further divided. In other cases,
the land has degenerated as a result of unsustainable practices, or larger
commercial agricultural enterprises have swallowed up any remaining cropland.

Without a secure, independent
living, these men find themselves unable to marry or earn the respect of their
peers, contends Ohlsson. British researcher Chris Dolan has coined the
expression "the proliferation of small men" in reference to the growing number
of disenfranchised young men in northern Uganda who cannot fulfill their
culture's expectations of a "full man." Dolan has found that such men
disproportionately become alcoholic, engage in violence, or commit suicide.

Or join a militia. Insurgent
organizations can offer social mobility and self-esteem, particularly in
countries that are economically backward and politically repressive. During the
recent civil war in Sierra Leone, young people constituted about 95 percent of
the fighting forces, in part because there were few other options. Sierra Leone
ranked as the world's least developed country on the United Nations' 173-nation
Human Development Index in 2002, and the gross national income per capita in
2000 totaled only $140 (compared with $34,870 in the United States). An
official with the Christian Children's Fund in Freetown explained of the large
body of young soldiers, "They are a long-neglected cohort; they lack jobs and
training, and it is easy to convince them to join the fight."

Urban Youth

With few
opportunities in rural areas, young people in many developing countries are
increasingly forced to leave behind more traditional lifestyles and migrate to
cities in search of work, education, and urban amenities. The United Nations
projects that by 2007, for the first time ever, more people will be living in
cities than in rural areas. This urban share could top 60 percent by
2030-with almost all of this growth projected to occur in the developing world.

With the influx of young workers
and students, many urban areas are now home to significant, and potentially
volatile, youth bulges. Drawing on case studies of several Asian countries,
University of Hawaii political scientist Gary Fuller warns that rapidly
industrializing cities and frontier areas can be spawning grounds for political
unrest because thousands of young men migrate to these sites in search of
livelihoods. Yet urbanization is proceeding faster than municipalities can
provide infrastructure, services, and jobs. Municipal governments in the
least-developed countries are often the least able to muster the human and
financial resources to contend with
these problems, especially when the poorest, non-taxable segment of the urban
population continues to grow rapidly.

But it is not just the poor or
uneducated who are discontented. "We have a large number of youth between 18
and 35 who are properly educated, but have nothing to do," lamented William
Ochieng, a former government official, in Kenya's The Daily Nation in January 2002. Urban discord,
more than the rural sort, afflicts diverse social classes, including recruits
from politicized students, the angry unemployed, and the politically
disaffected. Many of these, especially those from middle-class backgrounds,
bring with them the skills and resources to organize and finance civil protest.

Studies show that the risks of
instability among youth may increase when skilled members of elite classes are
marginalized by a lack of opportunity. Yale University historian Jack Goldstone
has noted that the rebellions and religious movements of the 16th and 17th
centuries were led by young men of the ruling class who, upon reaching
adulthood among an overly large cohort, found that their state's patronage
system could not afford to reward them with the salary, land, or bureaucratic
position commensurate with their class and educational achievements. Rather
than allow political discontent to fester, European militarists and Ottoman
expansionists induced thousands of young men of privilege to serve their
interests in military campaigns and overseas colonial exploits, putting them in
charge of literally millions of the unschooled from the urban and rural
under-classes.

It isn't difficult to find
contemporary parallels. Goldstone attributes the collapse of the Communist
regime in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s in part to the mobilization of
large numbers of discontented young men who were unable to put their technical
educations to use due to party restrictions on entering the elite. And Samuel
P. Huntington, Harvard professor and author of the controversial treatise on
the "clash of civilizations," has pointed to connections between tensions in
the Middle East (where 65 percent of the population is under the age of 25) and
the unmet expectations of skilled youth. Many Islamic countries, he argues,
used their oil earnings to train and educate large numbers of young people, but
with little parallel economic growth few have had the opportunity use their
skills. Young, educated men, Huntington concludes, often face only three paths:
migrate to the West, join fundamentalist organizations and political parties, or
enlist in guerrilla groups and terrorist networks.

Discontented elites may in turn
mobilize less-­educated groups to their cause. Investigations into Thailand's
recent upsurge in violence point to the possible involvement of Muslim
extremist groups, who may be actively targeting young men of strong religious
faith and little formal education to further their broader Islamist goals. In
the town of Suso, which lost 18 men under the age of 30 to the April uprising,
most of the dead had graduated from the country's privately run Islamic schools
(pondoks), which are often a last
resort for families that cannot afford mainstream college educations. In
Pakistan, meanwhile, studies estimate that as many as 10 to 15 percent of the
country's 45,000 religious schools (madrasas) have
direct links to militant groups.

Looking Ahead

How strong
is the link between youth and conflict? In 2003, researchers with the
Washington, D.C.-based group Population Action International (PAI) reviewed the
data on population and past conflicts and found that countries in which young
adults made up more than 40 percent of all adults were about two-and-a-half times as likely to experience an
outbreak of civil conflict during the 1990s as other countries. The study
identified 25 countries where a large youth bulge, coupled with high rates of
urban growth and shortages of either cropland or fresh water, creates a "very
high risk" of conflict. Fifteen of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa,
two are in the Middle East (Yemen and the Occupied Palestinian Territories),
and the rest are in Asia or the Pacific Islands. According to Uppsala
University's Conflict Database, nine of these countries experienced a civil
conflict just within the first three years of this decade (2000-2002).

As evidence of this link emerges,
the global security community has begun to take notice-though it's been slower
to take action. In April 2002, in a written response to congressional
questioning, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency noted that "several troublesome
global trends-especially the growing demographic youth bulge in developing
nations whose economic systems and political ideologies are under enormous
stress-will fuel the rise of more disaffected groups willing to use violence to
address their perceived grievances." The CIA warned that current U.S. counter­terrorist
operations might not eliminate the threat of future attacks because they fail
to address the underlying causes that drive terrorists.

Large youth bulges should
eventually dissipate as fertility rates continue their worldwide decline.
Already, between 1990 and 2000, the number of countries where young adults
account for 40 percent or more of all adults decreased by about one-sixth,
primarily because of declining fertility in East Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin
America. However, a more persistent group of countries in the early stages of
their demographic transition-most in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South
and Central Asia, and the Pacific Islands-remain as a challenge to global
development and security.

Fortunately, demographics is not
destiny. But the likelihood of future conflict may ultimately reflect how
societies choose to deal with their demographic challenges. In its recent
analysis, for instance, PAI discovered that roughly half of the very high risk
countries navigated the post-Cold War period peacefully. How? In at least some
of these cases, policies were in place that provided young men with occupations
and opportunities-including land reform and frontier settlement schemes, migration
abroad, industrialization, and the expansion of military and internal security
forces. The latter strategy, PAI suggests, probably helped repressive regimes
such as North Korea, China, and Turkmenistan maintain political stability
during the post-Cold War era despite large proportions of young adults.

In the short term, governments will
need to tackle the underlying factors contributing to discontent among young
people, including poverty and the lack of economic opportunity. And governments
can address part of the risk associated with youth unemployment by investing in
job creation and training, boosting access to credit, and promoting
entrepreneurship.

Ultimately, however, the only way
to achieve the necessary long-term changes in age structure will be through
declines in fertility. Governments can facilitate fertility decline by
supporting policies and programs that provide access to reproductive health
services-voluntary family planning services and maternal and child health
programs and counseling, including providing accurate information for young
adults-and by promoting policies that increase girls' educational attainment
and boost women's opportunities for employment outside the home.

For countries in the early stages
of their demographic transitions, it could take nearly two decades after
fertility begins to fall to observe a significant reduction in the proportion
of young adults. Given the many risks of delaying the demographic transition,
this only underscores the need for governments to put supportive policies into
effect sooner rather than later.

Lisa Mastny is a research associate at Worldwatch. This article, with
additional material, is adapted by arrangement from Richard P. Cincotta, Robert
Engelman, and Daniele Anastasion, The Security Demographic: Population
and Civil Conflict after the Cold War
(Washington, D.C.: Population Action International, 2003).

References
and readings for each article are available at www.worldwatch.org/pubs/mag/.